บท 28: Splitting the Spoils
The dinner finished without further incident, and as a further apology to Kordia, Kir escorted her outside the inn and presented her with the black mana crystal he'd saved from the shop.
"A-are you sure I can have this? This is soul stone grade..." She said, marveling at the luminescent refractions in the inky black of its depths.
"What does that mean?" Kir asked.
"I could get my own familiar with this... or trade it to a magic being for something... these are so rare..." Kordia's eyes teared up.
"So, uh... I take it not everyone has a familiar?" Kir asked, scratching next to his horn.
"You have to have an extreme amount of mana to even form a pact with one... without contract magic that is. And then sustaining them is something only a dedicated mage or witch could accomplish. A soul stone grade mana crystal is at least the minimum one needs, and then one has to find a magic being to make a pact..." She blushed. "I was a little jealous when I saw you have a familiar. What kind of being is she, really?"
Kir thought 'A pain in my ass' but what he said was "She was... sort of between contracts when we ran into each other. We agreed to help each other out for the time being..." he evaded.
Kordia, thankfully, seemed to accept this answer. "Well, I can't wait to see what she's like in school... It's such a shame we won't be in the same year... but maybe... if you want... we could meet at lunch?"
"I'd love that," Kir said, smiling.
After a set of awkward goodbyes, Kir turned back to the inn and walked up the few steps.
"You like her," Stella said, once more hanging on the hair on the back of his head.
"Please don't..." Kir groaned.
After heading upstairs, he found his moms waiting for him.
"Alright, now answer us the mystery of your new clothes," Brigit said once the door was closed. There were two beds in the room, one for them and one for Kir.
"Before I do that, mind if I unload some things?" Kir asked, pulling out the storage cloth. As soon as they agreed, he unfurled it and stopped supplying it with mana, feeling a wave of relief as his supply started regenerating after so many hours.
On it appeared every magic item he'd acquired from Corwin's shop, as well as containers full of ingredients, bottles of potions, and random non-magical items he found interesting.
"You have a lot of explaining to do..." Brigit said as she wondered over the items on display.
"Well... It started when I went looking for you..."
They were well into the night by the time the story ended, and close to midnight when his moms ran out of questions. He left out the part about Stella being a succubus, but that was the only thing he kept from them.
Thankfully, they agreed that Kir had done the right thing, though it certainly wasn't the legal thing.
"I think the next thing we need to figure out is what to do with all this evidence," Darlae said.
Brigit, for once, was less subtle than her wife. "Dibs on the unicorn parts!"
As they sorted through everything, Kir discovered just how cheap Corlwin had been, since most of the stuff was useful but not worth the prices he'd seen on them. He started to suspect the shop had just been a front for something else, especially since he knew after hours of sustaining it that Corlwin wouldn't have had the stamina to maintain the storage cloth.
His parents were able to identify the clothes Kir wore as doing exactly what he figured, being magicked for comfort and form-fitting, which also accounted for why the top had generated slits for his wings.
In the end, it was agreed that Darlae and Brigit would take everything magical except for the clothes Kir wore, the storage cloth, the eight unlabeled potions, and a storage chest's worth of magical ingredients that Brigit said Kir would need eventually. The regular items that Kir kept were a mask, several books whose contents were random, and a bottle of fine wine for a special occasion.
Kir insisted on an even split for the money Corlwin had stashed away, which ended up giving him more than enough to last all five years in the Academy, if Kordia's estimate was accurate.
The problem remained, however, that Kir had no time to study for his entrance exam.
"I guess we'll just have to hope," Darlae said. "It's not like the Arcane Knights where you just have to kick someone's ass."
"Nonsense, Kir's a brilliant student, I'm sure he can figure something out..." Brigit said, before jumping where she sat on the bed. "I almost forgot! I picked up the subject list for tomorrow's test." She handed it to Kir and he took a look.
"Arithmetic... History... Elemental Theory... Reading and Writing... Wait... that's it?" Kir asked.
"That, and the practical exam," Brigit said. "When you'll have a chance to put your skills on display."
"I'm going to fail History, I know that," Kir said. "And you know my opinion of Elemental Theory."
"You should still know the basic interactions," Brigit said. "At least not until you have the credentials to present that alternative you found in my books."
"Y-yeah..." Kir looked away. Forging a periodic table of elements in her advanced-level magic book had taken him ages because the book had been encoded.
He'd lost a lot of time having to wipe and rewrite whole pages worth of data and in the end, he'd settled on going from light elements to heavy by dedicating one page to describing each, virtually doubling the size of the book.
"Alright, well, I guess if this is all I need to know, I think sleep would be more valuable for me." Kir made an exaggerated yawn and started to stretch. "Maybe I'll come up with an original spell..."
The storage cloth had given him some ideas. He needed a way to figure out its magic circle, since trying to learn how to stow away his wings through transformation had failed under Stella's instruction. Spatial manipulation had occurred to him before, and now that he had an example of it he was eager to try it.
It certainly seemed less painful than his theory that Maledict could "ungrow" his wings in a reversal of the process that produced them.
For some reason, the transformative magic that came naturally to angels and demons was denied to him. Demonkin like Morn could not naturally suppress their wings either.
He idly fiddled with his tail as he sat down, thinking about these problems, until he realized that Stella hadn't spoken in a while. He didn't want to lay on her, so he reached behind his head and pulled his familiar gently from his hair, only to find her asleep already.
Laying her on his chest, he listened to his moms whispering to each other until at last his eyes closed and he drifted off.
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